Visual Lorem Ipsum: The Photography That Fills Space Without Saying Anything

The wonderful generic and trite stock image that AI can generate so well now

Designers use Lorem Ipsum when the real content is not ready yet. It holds the space. It looks like text. It functions as a signal that something meaningful will go here eventually. Most corporate and sustainability reports contain the visual equivalent. I call it Visual Lorem Ipsum — and it is costing organisations more than they realise.

What Visual Lorem Ipsum Looks Like

A worker in unmarked PPE. A generic handshake. A landscape that could belong to any organisation operating anywhere in the world.

The images are not wrong, exactly. They are simply not real. They carry no trace of the specific company, the specific site, or the specific people behind the commitments printed beside them.

Like filler text, Visual Lorem Ipsum can attract the eye. It fills the white space. It suggests that someone has thought about the visual layer of the document. But it communicates nothing a stakeholder can actually use.

Why It Damages the Written Narrative

Stakeholders do not evaluate imagery and copy separately. They read them together.

When the image alongside a claim about environmental stewardship shows a field that has never been near the company's operations, the credibility of the claim does not remain unchanged. It drops. The copy may be accurate. The supporting image has undermined it.

This is the mechanism behind the Visual Credibility Gap. The written narrative makes a commitment. The photograph is supposed to be the evidence. Visual Lorem Ipsum is, in the precise sense, fiction placed beside fact.

Across my Project Authenticity review of fifteen Western Canadian organisations, this was the single most consistent visual failure. Not poor photography. Not a weak brief. Imagery specifically chosen to look meaningful while remaining safely generic.

Where It Comes From

Visual Lorem Ipsum is not usually a deliberate choice. It is the default outcome of a photography brief that asks the wrong question.

Most corporate photography briefs ask: what should the images look like? The answer to that question produces technically accomplished, professionally produced, emotionally inert photographs. They look right. They prove nothing.

The question that eliminates Visual Lorem Ipsum is different: what do the images need to prove? That question forces specificity. It requires the photographer to have access to the actual operation, the actual people, the actual environment. It cannot be answered with stock.

The Fix Is in the Brief, Not the Budget

Organisations that score poorly on Visual Lorem Ipsum in a Project Authenticity audit are not short of photography investment. Several of the most heavily affected reports in my review had significant production budgets.

The investment went into making the images look accomplished. Nobody asked whether the images carried evidential weight.

Those are different briefs. They produce very different reports. And stakeholders, increasingly, can tell the difference.

About Project Authenticity

Project Authenticity is a structured audit framework for corporate and ESG visual communications. It scores reports across six criteria on a 30-point scale, producing an Authenticity Index that identifies where the gap between written narrative and visual evidence is widest. Visual Lorem Ipsum is assessed under the Authenticity and Indexicality criteria.

Originally published: LinkedIn / The Story That Shows, 2 April 2026